Humble young writer finds $2000 prize too grand by half

Writing three well-crafted, witty short stories is not what makes Michelle Chuong an unusual individual. Nor is winning a competition against year 11 and 12 students when she comes from a Vietnamese-speaking family and is only in year 10.

What makes Michelle really unusual is that she is a 16-year-old who doesn't know what to do with $2000. Michelle donated half of her prize, for winning the Herald's Young Writer of the Year Award, to breast cancer research.

"I don't need $2000," she said after yesterday's presentation. "What am I going to do with it? But I have an aunt who had breast cancer, and it was really hard, so I want to give half the money for research."

Michelle's humble response to the award was typical, said her teacher at Hurlstone Agricultural College, Lisa Manyweathers.

"Michelle's very artistic and active, one of those kids everyone likes," she said. "She'll be very modest about her success."

Michelle won the prize yesterday from a field of 15 regional winners in the annual competition. Caitlin Witt, a year-12 student from Trinity Catholic College, Lismore, was named runner-up.

One of Michelle's winning stories, It's Antiques, was read aloud at the presentation by Jason Rushton, a St Aloysius College student who won the Herald's Plain English Speaking Award this year.

Michelle said she was 'in an ag paddock drenching a cow" at school when she learnt she was a finalist. "My teacher called me out, and I thought, what have I done this time?"

She had been a reluctant entrant in the competition when Ms Manyweathers set the story-writing exercise as classwork.

"I asked if I could write a story but not enter it," Michelle said.

She felt hesitant about competing, coming from a family where her parents, Mai and John, had learnt English only after fleeing Vietnam as refugees before she was born.

"We mix Vietnamese and English at home," she said.

"My parents speak Vietnamese with each other, and I've been able to speak Vietnamese since I could walk."

Her favourite subjects are chemistry and art; her first love is sculpture, and she is a keen tennis player. She spends much of her out-of-school time helping out at Bach Dang, the Vietnamese restaurant in Canley Vale where her mother is the chef. All these activities limit her time for reading and writing.

The keys to writing her stories, she said, were "writing what I think" and "making the ending unpredictable, so there's something dramatic waiting for the reader".

After Michelle donated $1000 to breast cancer research, the Herald matched the donation.

One of her stories, Bobby's Left Shoe, will be published in Spectrum next Saturday.